As Women's Status Rises, So Do Literary 'Shes'

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The prevalence of female pronouns — she, her, hers, herself — in
American books could be used to track the changing status of
women in the 20th century, according to a new study, which found
the he/she ratio after the late 1960s mirrored advances in gender
equality.

Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State
University, and her colleagues analyzed more than a million books
on Google's Ngram Viewer for the use of
gendered pronouns published between 1900 and 2008.

For every "she" found in this sample between 1900 and 1945, there
were about 3.5 "hes." The gap then grew during the post-World War
II era, increasing to a male-to-female ratio of about 4.5 to 1.
But the use of female pronouns in books began rising in the late
1960s. By the mid-1970s, the male-to-female ratio of pronouns in
American books dropped to 3 to 1. And by the 2000s, it was 2 to
1. The researchers believe these changes occurred in step with
rapid advances in gender equality — evident in other factors such
as more education and more participation in the labor force —
starting in the late 1960s.

"These trends in language quantify one of the largest, and most
rapid, cultural changes ever observed: The incredible increase in
women's status since the late 1960s in the U.S.," Twenge said in
a statement from Springer, which published the research in its
journal Sex Roles."Gender equality is the clear upside of the
cultural movement toward individualism in the U.S., and books
reflect this movement toward equality. That's exciting because it
shows how we can document social change."

The researchers pointed to a few possible reasons for this
correlation. Authors might have used the universal "he" as a
default pronoun during periods when women's status was lower, the
researchers wrote in their paper. Meanwhile, authors in eras with
increased gender equality might have switched between "he" and
"she" or used constructions like "he/she" and "he or she." They
also might have included more female topics or characters in
their books.

This isn't the first study to look at the
link between language and equality. Past research found that
languages across the globe in which nouns are given male or
female status are linked to gender inequality. Surprisingly, that
study, detailed in a 2012 issue of the journal Sex Roles, found
that languages with no gender ("he" and "she" are represented by
the same word) had the most gender
inequality, perhaps because people automatically categorize
gender-neutral references as male.